Cycopl

nwn toolkit revisited

Pretty much all I've done in the past day is mess around with the nwn toolkit, and it's pretty cool. I've been having a lot of fun messing around with the scripting and basically learning stuff you need to know to make a good module. I'm currently (like, right now) working on a "TestModule", but it's not just gonna be a random stuff, but an actual quest in which you have to test out all of the situations I give you.

So far, I've done two simple little quests... On the first quest, you're in a room with 4 little kids, and an elf. The elf tells you to talk to one little kid, and then that kid tells you to somebody else, and then the other kid tells you that you're supposed to talk to somebody else, until you've talked to everybody. Then the elf guy gives you an experience reward after you've successfully talked to everybody (including him) in the correct order.

The other quest is more fun to test, and it was way easier to do also. The next room has this little halfling guy crying about how a goblin stole his book, asking you to retrieve it for him. The goblin is in the other room, and spawns when you enter the room. The book is on his corpse when he dies, and then you bring it to the halfling, and he, of course, gives you an experience reward, and a heavy crossbow +1.

You know, just simple stuff really.

The quest I'm currently working on is very ambitious... I'm going to create a new map, and it's going to be a city that is under siege by goblins. That's not really hard, but I want to make it so once you've finished the quest, the town will function like a regular town, with no monsters inside of it. But if you wanted to do the quest again, you could activate it and the goblins would respawn. That would be coolio.

I'm having a lot of fun playing with the toolkit, though. Usually when I mess with game engine toolkits, I'm so overwhelmed with scripting and coding and lots of other stuff that I lose all interest completely in creating anything for the game. The NWN toolkit is different, it's really easy to use and there's a lot of sites that explain stuff really well. And their builder message board is awesome.

So yeah... I think I might have to go to sleep pretty soon, but I wanna keep working on this module.

NWN Toolkit is heart

I have been playing around with it, and it's surprisingly easy to use. The map editor makes nice looking maps with little effort, NPC's are easy to place, conversations are easy to create (except they take a while if it's a long convo).

I'm gonna make a mod for NWN once I learn how to script well and stuff. I think I could make something really cool, just because of past experience with RPGs and the freedom I have to make it however I want.

Things to expect if I made a mod:

Modern technological advances set in a fantasy world. Ring ring, oh, hello Thalor Darkweaver, thanks for calling me on my medieval cellphone. Basically just NPC's will use these, or mention them, the player wouldn't actually be able to get a medieval cellphone. Well, maybe they would, if there's an item like "brick" or "chunk of wood" that I could rename to cellphone, that would be radness.

References to practically every badass console (or PC) RPG that Joe has ever played and enjoyed thoroughly. You spoony bard. I sure wish I could summon Bahamut Zero instead of this faggy badger.

Lots of swearing. Well fuck you then. I didn't want to tell you where the fucking hammer of goblin's bane was anyway, fucking faggot.

Actual uses for skills other than combat related skills. This has been bugging me a lot. On all of the servers I have played, there seems to be no use to take any of the "diplomacy" skills, i.e. persuade and intimidate. It's probably just laziness on the implementor's part, but I think persuade and intimidate should be much more viable than they currently are. Also, more abundant hidden stuff, to make listen and spot more useful. They seemed useful in single player, but I have never put them to good use on a multiplayer server. So much potential.

Luckily, these can all be pretty easily done with the NWN toolset... it's really easy to learn and get used to, even though I haven't really even scratched the surface of what it can really do. I need to learn how to do the scripting part of it, so I can actually add a bit of interaction to the game.

Finally, a little screenie of what I've been learning.

weird sleeping habits...

It's 11:20 am as I'm typing this... I'm having trouble deciding if I want to go to sleep right now or try and stay up so I'm back on a regular sleeping schedule. It's gonna suck either way. If I got to sleep now, I probably won't wake up until 8PM or something like that, and if I stay awake... well then I'll have to stay awake. And that sucks when you're tired.

I got bored last night (this morning actually) and decided to break out my Neverwinter Nights CD and find a good server to play on, and I actually found a couple. One was a LOTR themed server that was pretty newbie friendly... actually TOO newbie friendly. I was level 7 in about two hours. Anybody who plays NWN should know that kind of leveling is almost impossible on most servers. But then the server crashed and hasn't come back up yet, so I found a server called Shadowrealm. It was really cool, and really newbie friendly in a non-easy way. I'm only level 3 right now (after playing hardcore for about 4 hours), but from what I've seen, it's quite possible to solo a melee character. This is a really good thing, in my opinion... I'm not really big on partying with a bunch of people, unless they're friends of mine. I think I've explained it on this blog before, actually.

Anyway, the people seemed pretty friendly also. There were about 11 other people on when I was playing, and I think it can hold like 64 players or something. I'll definitely be playing on there again though... It was the most "MMORPG-ish" server I think I've played on since I bought the game nearly six months ago, and the fact that it's free makes it even more fun... I don't feel like I'm being forced to play it because I'm bound by a monthly fee like on MMORPG's. Free = cool. (I *did* buy the game, though...)

LANin' it up.

That's what I've been doing for the past week... hence the lack of updates. You would think that sitting around computers practically nonstop for a whole week would make me update more, but I'm usually too busy playing games or something to worry about something like updating my site. So yeah, I updated. Not much else to say.

Oh yeah, I hate DOAXBV. That's all.

Lots of sleep

I did something that I've needed to do for the past week now... Slept for a really long time. I got about 13 hours of sleep last night, and I feel great now. I've been going the past week on 3-4 hour naps, and I was starting to feel really shitty in general, so I just slept a lot and I feel better now.

I downloaded the Animatrix dvd-rip and watched it this morning, and it was cool.

Update goes here

I felt that I needed to update so here it is.

Update on the game piracy situation: Vice City is cool, Enter the Matrix would be cool if the controls didn't suck shit. It desperately needs patching, and it really needs to be more customized for PC rather than just a console to PC port. Freelancer is uber boring now, but I'll probably get back into it sometime.

Matrix Reloaded is cool, I've seen it twice already. Once Tuesday night, and last night. Great movie, anybody who thinks otherwise is a faggot. November needs to hurry up and come so I can see Revolutions.

Vice City PC!

I'm downloading it right now... I've been waiting so long for this to come out and now it's FINALLY out. I'm so happy.

First thing I'm gonna do after I install it is fill the MP3 radio station up with rockin' 80's metal bands and it'll kick the shit outta VROCK.

VICE CITY PC WOO! PARTAAYYYYY!!! WOO

Robocop Sucks.

Robocop is a terrible, terrible game. It's obviously a console game ported to PC, not the other way around. The grapics look like the game was made in like 1998 or something, while the game was made in 2003. The controls are pretty standard for an FPS, except you can't pause it and change the controls during gameplay. You actually have to exit out of the game you're playing and go back to the main menu to change the controls. You can't quickload/quicksave, you can only save after beating a level, and you can only load from those save points. Not a good game... not worth the CD I burned it onto.

Sorry

I just noticed that I cussed a lot in that last entry... Sorry about that. When I get pissed off at something I swear a lot.

I downloaded this game for PC called Robocop, and strangely enough, it's a game about Robocop. I haven't played it yet but it's installing right now... it's a brand new game, but it's weird that I haven't heard of it. Well, I guess it's time to see if it's any good or not...

XTREME GAMING DOODZ

There seems to be a lot of new contenders coming up in the in the handheld game console industry. First was the Nokia N-gage, which actually just seems like a cellphone that plays PSX ports, and now there's this thing from an unknown company called Tapwave. The "codename" of their handheld console is "Helix". After watching the video on their website, one could conclude that the only game that will be on this console will be Tony Hawk. And it will also make you good at things like skateboarding, deejaying, and holding kittens while wearing unnecessarily large headphones.

The demo video on their website pissed me off for some reason. At least enough to make me want to update my blog and point it out to everybody else. I mean, the video is close to 5 megs, about two minutes long, and it has literally about ten seconds of game footage. The rest of the video is just people jumping around on skateboards and playing with turntables. Perhaps they're trying to make it seem like you're "cool" if you buy their game. This is confirmed by all of the skateboarders and deejays in their demo video.

I have a really good idea that would probably sell lots of the little game consoles though. Seriously, I think I should go into an advertising job or something after coming up with this idea. All they would have to do is fucking show footage from the fucking games, instead of showing a bunch of fucking idiots bouncing around on slabs of wood with wheels. Who gives a fuck about skateboarders? Seriously, this is fucking video games. It's not a fucking shoe commercial, or a deodorant commercial. It's VIDEO GAMES. You sit around and play them. I really hate stuff sometimes.

Oh hey again

Does anybody remember when I said that Wind Waker was probably going to be one of the best games ever made?

Yeah, I'm just that fucking good.

Hey

I felt like updating, but I don't know what to update about. I downloaded a bunch of Jackie Chan movies, and one of them was City Hunter.

Best. Jackie. Chan. Movie. Ever.

Well, maybe not, but it was so funny that I had to say something about it. The whole style of the movie is like watching an anime. You would probably have to download the movie to understand what I'm talking about, but it's definitely not for anybody wanting to see a "serious" movie.

Yeah, I saw X-Men 2 also. It was cool.